 Hello! We can thank our musician for this evening, Morgan Davies, in perhaps giving him a second round of applause. Thank you, Morgan. I would like to welcome all of you here tonight. Particularly those that have travelled a long way to be here. A special welcome to Professor Francesca Oattawe friends, family and 남 y wneud. Thank you also to those from other institutions Mae awgurdod hynny'n gwneud. Felly ein celeoteir ac yma ac yn ei wneud yn cyfaint gyda'r gwybod. Mae yna ddod y 5th yn awgurdod chefnu'r wneud. Prof. Fassouda Daimhaya os i'r prof. o'r Cynig o'r rai. Ffasudad Dalmyr yw Professor Emeritus of Hindi and Modern South Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also held the Magistrate Distinguished Professorship in South and Southeast Asian Studies. She retired in 2014 as Yale University's first professor in Hindu Studies. Her monograph, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions, studies the life and writings of a major Hindi writer of the 19th century as the focal point for an examination of the intricate links between language, culture, religion and nationalism in colonial India. Her work on drama, poetics, plays and performances, the politics of modern Indian theatre, traces the genealogies of theatre in modern India, particularly the appropriation of folk theatre as it sought to constitute itself after independence. A collection of her essays was published recently under the title, Hindu Pasts, Women, Religion and Histories. Professor Rachel Dwyer will deliver the vote of thanks. Rachel Dwyer is Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at SOAS. Her main research interest is in Hindi cinema, where she has published books, articles and essays on film, magazines and popular fiction, consumerism and the new middle classes, love and eroticism, visual culture, religion, emotions, stars and star families and Gandhi and the biopic. We are very grateful to both of them for being part of this evening's event. Please join us for a drinks reception upstairs in the Brunai Suite at the end of the lecture. Two final points of housekeeping. Please do note where the fire exits are in case the alarm sounds. For those of you who want to tweet during the lecture, we do encourage it, but please make sure your phones are in silent mode. To introduce Professor Orsini, I will now pass over to Professor Dahl Meir. It's a privilege to be here on this important occasion and to introduce Professor Francesca Orsini once more to you. Most of you already know her, but not all of you may know the multiple directions of our scholarly work. I have known her since the early 1990s when she was just embarking on dissertational research here in SOAS. I have seen her grow from a very promising doctoral student to one of the most original and enterprising scholars in the field of Hindi literature. Her book The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940, Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism 2002, is considered a major landmark in the field of modern Indian literary studies. Based on material meticulously collected from a range of fields, education records, women's journals, peasant pamphleteering, political works, popular novels, as much as from high literature, it yet comes together as a tightly argued and clearly structured work on an immensely important period in the history of modern India, the two decades between the two world wars from 1920-1940. This was a period when the Hindi-speaking belt of North India had become the centre of nationalist politics and aspirations. If on the one hand Gandhi had achieved the spectacular feat of turning the Indian National Congress into a party with a wide mass appeal, with increasing participation by women, there was also vocal and physical resistance to economic exploitation by a large body of politicised peasants who were demanding radical reform in the mode and manner of exacting revenue. Modern Hindi literature was fanning out to include these voices. Mainstream nationalism was thus just one major artery in the body politic of North India. The conflict resolutions which were found then anticipated the currents largely condeservative that were to manifest themselves yet more clearly in independent India and determined the course that the Hindi literary can and indeed Hindi as the official language of the nation was to take. Dr Orsini is the first scholar to have charted this course in such a brilliant and conclusive fashion, an incredible feat for what was originally a doctoral dissertation. Her second monograph, Pleasure and Print, Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India 2009, represents the first comprehensive attempt to gauge the impact of the popular press in Hindi and Urdu in post-1857 British North India. Dr Orsini minds a large and largely untapped archive in order to explore the role of popular song books, theatre transcripts, serialised fiction and chapbooks at large in the creation of Hindi public culture. She asks, how did the new technology of printing and the enterprise of Indian publishers make the book a familiar object in a largely illiterate society? What genres became popular in print? Who read them and how were they read? In doing so, Dr Orsini discovers and recreates worlds lost to a wider North Indian audience after the Hindi Urdu divide. At the same time, she traces the slow crystallisation of Hindi as different from Urdu even in popular print, an act first cemented in the 1890s detective novel industry, and in that pleasure of all pleasures, the kiss or tale of Chandrakanta, a fantastic tale so popular that people learnt Hindi in order to read it. With a training in high as well as popular literature from the late 19th century to the present century, Dr Orsini next embarked on a challenging multi-year project on the literary cultures of 15th to 17th century North India. As the research of the last decades has shown, modern Hindi reaches back no earlier than two centuries at most. However, it rests on and draws upon a range of literary cultures, many of which have today come to be regarded as regional variants of Hindi, or indeed polarised to such extent as in the case of Urdu that they are regarded as entirely disconnected with each other. Conceived in collaboration with historians, literary scholars and a well-known ethnomusicologist, this project consisted of a series of workshops, conferences, lectures and seminars revolving around the issues emerging from the consideration of multilingual literary cultures with multiple locations of literary production, locations that ranged from regional and imperial courts to Sufi centres, Hindu temples, monasteries and village squares. A text that came into being by the product of complex interchange between these locations and of the people involved in their production and dissemination. Poets, performers and connoisseurs often buy or even trylingual people who straddle several dominions and languages. Dr Hussini organised three large conferences on the historically understudied long 15th century on Indo-Persian literature and multilingual India and on orality and performance. The two co-edited volumes that have resulted from this project after Timur left culture and circulation in 15th century in North India 2014 and tellings and texts, music, storytelling and performance in North India 2015 are not only path-breaking, they open several further avenues for further scholarship. Most of all, they challenge simplistic notions of two separate and Hindi literary histories and Hindu and Muslim as belonging to two mutually exclusive monolithic religious communities. Dr Hussini's present project, multilingual locals and significant geographies for a bottom-up approach to world literature grows naturally out of this work which showed so clearly that the multilingual culture of early modern North India built the bedrock from which the modern and the so-called post-colonial have grown. The complex connection of these multilingual and multi-locational cultures to any simplistic notion of world literature is thus easily imaginable. It is to explore these connections that Professor Hussini's present comparative project, supported by the European Research Council and covering the course of colonialism and nationalism, has developed along with colleagues working on the margrib and the horn of Africa. There is virtually no work that engages in such cross-cultural investigation. Professor Hussini's lecture today is based on the research for this new project and is entitled, Literature in a Multilingual Society. Well, thank you all, thank you particularly for Professor Dharmia, for Vasuda for coming such a long way, to Rachel, Professor Dwyer for being my oldest source friend since 1992, to all of you for coming. I'm not sure if Alok is here yet. Maybe he will come. My family is also here and I hope they will perhaps finally understand what multilingual is about, though I'm not sure. The last thing I'm sorry, I actually became a professor two years ago but for various reasons couldn't give this talk before so Paul Webley can't be here and that's a regret, but what to do? All completely my fault. So let me start with a concrete example. This is an example of ordinary multilingualism from the second half of the 19th century, played out among small towns in the hinterland of colonial Benares. Bhanupratap was born in a village and raised first by his grandfather while his father was working away in Mirzapur. He showed autobiography, which he wrote and finished in 1890, is basically a catalogue of what he studied and read and with whom. First, his grandfather made him learn by heart a large number of devotional couples between the age of three and a half and five. Then at five, after his staunchest ceremony and the ritual worship of study books, his grandfather taught him Hindi and Sanskrit. While a local pious man read with him a modern Hindi prose version of Krishna's life, most of the works by the late 16th century poet Tulsidas in one of the old literary dialects of Hindi. At age eight, Bhanupratap's father decided it was time for him to learn Farsi Persian. Here is the ritualised way in which his teacher at Chunar Mission School began his instruction. Now, if we look back at Bhanupratap's education, what strikes us is first of all how patchy it was, how it was basically geared as stacking up language skills, how little of it happened in schools. What about his literary tastes? The archive where I found his autobiography holds his manuscript Hindi translation of the Persian classic Sadi's Gulistan and one within the couplets that his grandfather made him learn by heart. He also tells us that he wrote a local history of the town of Chunar. But what we know from his autobiography is that a literary taste begins through acquiring language and a sense of meter through memorising a large number of verses in Hindi and Farsi, that he acquired most of his language skills and poetic taste through formal study, but Urdu poetry for example seems to have been a by-product of learning Persian. He never mentioned studying it with a master. All these tastes are shared practices. As you can see, practices of reading, recitation and singing. Bhanupratap shares his taste with different people who only partly overlap. With some people he shares devotional singing and discourse. Satsang, his family was initiated in the devotional group called Darya Pant. They were perhaps also keen on Hindley courtly verse. With others he shared Persian poetry and it's not quite clear from what he says whether he ever developed a taste for English literature. For example, he talks of English knowledge, but did he read English literature? We don't know. And also in fact literature in modern Hindi. He's an exact contemporary of the father of modern Hindi, Bhartendu Harris Chandra of Benares. But he doesn't mention reading him or reading newspapers, nor does he mention the great revolt of 1857 for that matter, though he was right there where it happened. Endowed with a great keen sense of authorship, Bhanupratap, as you can see, translates the Persian verses into Hindi meters and enacts a kind of cultural equivalence. So he calls the Persian verse and then he gives in the margin his own verse, Brashbasha translation. And Allah becomes Ishwar and the Persian emperor becomes Lord Ram. So I will return to some of these points later in the course of this lecture. For the moment, I think we can already pull out a few observations. First, that multilingualism is structural to his society, particularly in terms of education and of poetic and religious cultivation and practice. However, it is not uniformly spread, which means we must avoid generalisations and pay attention to each particular configuration as Ronit Ricci was teaching us, telling us earlier today. Second, diaglosia, that is the hierarchy between a formally learned high language and a colloquial low language, is definitely there. We'll see it plays a large role in language ideologies, the way in which people think about and invest languages with value. But it by no means exhausts literary tastes and practices. Persian and English are valued by Bhanu Pratap, but that does not make Hindi a language that is dominated by them. Nor are these languages all struggling for the same stake in a single literary field, as Pierre Rourdieu and his successors would have us think. Third, formal institutional spaces, the school, the literary canon and so on, do not tell the whole story. We need to be wary of models that rely only on them to account for the dynamics of power relations in a literary culture. Whether it's the court in the early modern period or later the colonial education system, state literary academies or currently the world book market. None of them can claim to tell the whole story. So what I want to do today is to go through the questions that actually are laid out in the abstract one by one. Thinking about how they relate dynamically to each other and how different configurations are produced as we move from the pre-colonial to the colonial and post-colonial periods. So how does literature work within a multilingual society? How can we know? Spoken by and multilingualism are widespread enough, but what about written literature? How do multilingual practices square with language ideologies of nationalism and of English as a global language and the language of world literature? Interesting, if you ask writers locally, they will often say that they have little or no interaction with writers in the other languages. So do members of social literary communities live in worlds sealed by language then, aware of each other only by name perhaps? Finally, if you are a literary multilingual, how does that work? Do the different literary tastes and traditions you acquire live separately within your head or do they interact and produce new outcomes? So, let me start. How can we know? This is a question about methodology, but also about epistemology and the intellectual and practical obstacles to this kind of inquiry. Documents like Bhanopratab Soto Biography, which explicitly tell us how he acquired language and literary tastes are quite rare, unfortunately, as are also the authors who actually compose in more than one language. Moreover, early modern archives, whether Persian or Hindi, devotional or courtly, already practice their own exclusions or develop pet stories to explain multilingual literary practices. Usually they involve the poet falling in love with somebody from the other community, and that explains why they wrote in that language. So if you were writing a biographical dictionary of Persian poets or of Sufi's at Taskira, you would at the most mention then so and so also like to compose Hindi poetry, but frustratingly for us, you would not say what Hindi poetry exactly or in fact what he meant by Hindi, and you certainly did not quote it. So how can we know? Well, apart from putting together the available language archives, we need to look for any evidence of what Karen Thornbaugh usefully calls readerly, writerly and textual contexts. That is what and how people read in other languages, either in the original or in translation, interactions between authors in different languages and evidences within texts, translation, citation, rewriting. And this often involves looking for mere traces of the other languages. So on the left here you have a trace of a listening practice. This is a Sufi manual telling disciples how they should interpret the phrases and expressions that come up in the Hindi songs they listen to. So the text is in Persian, the red is Hindi. Now you've got this trace and it's a trace of a listening practice actually. And on the other side instead you have, I mean they look similar but actually the one on the right is basically in Avadir, an early form of Hindi and the multilingual trace are those little glosses, Persian glosses for every word. And this is more a trace and evidence of a serious editorial interest by a Persian intellectual into a vernacular text. But we also need to look for silences, gaps, exclusions. What or who is not mentioned, though we know they were there. And that's why in the course of the project we keep going back to a geographical approach looking at who lives where and gets mentioned or not mentioned. Why aren't they mentioned? In other words apart from the multilingual relationships that contemporaries or later scholars are happy to acknowledge, we have to become sensitive to the unacknowledged presences. And we also become wary of generalisations, even those made by contemporaries. Nobody could speak Persian, everybody could understand Persian. Only Brahmins knew Sanskrit, everyone was multilingual, only the elites were multilingual and so on. They usually issue from strong ideological positions and actively produce ignorance. And I have become very interested in the production of ignorance. And I hope I'm not producing any ignorance today. For example, literary histories focus on writing rather than other on practices of reading or listening. So even books on Muslim writers in Hindi present them as exceptions. Those few good Muslims who loved Hindi and served it rather than as members of this multilingual society who listened to the same tales, the same songs and occasionally wrote them. For the study of literature in a multilingual society, instead, accounts of ordinary practices of performance, listening, reading and ordinary people like Panu Pratap are absolutely crucial in order to place books, the material objects that come to us in particular scripts and formats in a wider context, in the fullness of their social world. And this brings me to the second point. So much of the work of the project on the multilingual literary culture in early modern North India that Professor Dharmia mentioned did exactly that, trying to place textual objects in fuller and more connected, in a fuller and more collected social world, starting from two simple assumptions. The first one is this. So instead of modern language ideologies that pit languages and their speakers against each other, it is surely better to think of languages including literary idioms as dialogical and shared systems of communication and expression as Mikhail Bakhting taught us. Some people indeed do think that a language belongs or belongs more to them, but that doesn't usually stop others from using it. Second, even people who write and converse with their peers in a high language, whether Persian or English, almost always know the vernacular and have some access to oral performative genres in it. By the same token, exposed to state apparatuses and religious rituals that use high languages, even illiterate people usually have some limited oral understanding of high languages or snippets of them, whether it's quasi sanskrit schlockers or Hindi matrix English, I think of dog Latin. Any fact may include them in their songs. The fact that so many of the literary genres of early modern India were meant for recitation, singing or performance, as the essays, intellings and texts show, supports the point that while the study of literary history is often all about written texts, it is imperative that we imagine them as parts of context of oral access and transmission. Look at this example by Maluk Das, a kind of local devotional poet from the early 17th century. Now he was not educated in Persian and yet you can see this poem, some poem is full of Persian words and expressions. Now we can use this quasi-Persian of this and other poems as Persian overheard and in turn the poem makes those snippets of Persian current among listeners who also do not know the language. Now of course the next question is why do we find so many Persian phrases and so many reference to the guy that peered the court of the Lord and the repetition of his name, Zikr in devotional song poems like this. Now one way of looking at them has been in terms of religious syncretism that Maluk Das was trying to create something new between different Hindu and mostly religious positions and identities. But the Bachtinian view would see this as Maluk Das using a shared religious and poetic idiom that was carrying around him and reaccenting it, giving it his new sort of meaning. After all we went to the small town of Kara and there his place was only a stone throw from an important Sufi establishment. So it made sense for him to know to show that he who in fact used many poetic idioms to show that he had command over the poetic as well as spiritual truth. The counter example of this kind of oral access to high language is the presence of courtly Hindi poetry, songs and Hindustani music within persophile Mughal culture from the heart of the imperial court to its provincial outposts as the important work of Catherine Scoffill and Alison Bush has showed us. This created a widely shared intermedial aesthetic as they call it of poetry, poetics, song, music and art. What happened to this connected multilingual world and this intermedial aesthetics under colonialism? It says make a pivot of established forms of patronage and its new ideas about knowledge and art. Catherine, Alison and Molly Aitken asked two years ago last year. Quite a few things happened pulling in various directions. It's interesting, I think accounts of the colonial encounter that consider only the world of English typically tend to overlook them. So let me go through some of these points. An altered equation between languages and between the oral and the written was at the heart of this transformation. So let's move on to the 19th century and beyond. So for one thing in the middle and later half of the 19th century we actually witnessed an intensification of eclectic multilingualism. I don't think people have attempted a comparison but there are striking similarities between the last king of avad, Vajidalisha, who as Richard Williams has shown remain active in his Calcutta exile until the 1880s and the father of modern Hindi, Induhareshchandra, the subject of Basudadalmia's pathbreaking monograph. Both of them were trained in high languages and poetic traditions, but both of them combine high tastes with a strong interest in drama and in popular songs and festivals. And Bartendu was also very involved in journalism, new prose genres and in elaborating new community ideas about language and literature. And yet his practice remained playfully eclectic. The new ideologies of language and community on which more in a minute jarred with these multilingual practices. And in the case of Harishchandra and Urdu, for example, produced an interesting contradiction. So on the right you have his statement to a Colonial Education Commission condemning Urdu as the language of pimps and prostitutes. On the left you see two different uses by him of the Urdu Razzal, the one below for satirical purposes, so in a sense in a line with his views you could say, but the one above for purely devotional purposes. And I would say that this slippage or straightforward contradiction between ideas about language and literary practices becomes a hallmark of modern multilingual literary culture. To the point that multilingual practices can be understood as a return of the repressed as will become clear at the end. Second, while we saw with Hanno Pratap at the beginning that education for him was all about acquiring languages and that formal schooling had been only a small part of it, the growth of formal colonial education had momentous consequences for the acquisition of literary tastes. It's new strong hierarchy with English at the top, the sense of colonial inferiority towards metropolitan English and English literary models that still bugs local critical discourse, whether it's realism for novels or romantic expression and nature for poetry, and the alienation from one's literary traditions, what Ganesh Devi has called colonial amnesia, are only part of this process. Other consequences have been the centrality of exams and textbook education which devalues and discourages the exploration of literature beyond the syllabus. The equation particularly of Hindi with national character building has led to the choice of edifying, like pillars of independence, as reading material, as your fund reading material, of edifying and usually terribly boring poems and stories in school textbooks. This implicitly suggests to school children that Hindi literature is inferior and much less fun to explore than English. So while postcolonial and postcolonial education have continued to be multilingual, they haven't stopped and where it is a different kind of multilingualism, more hierarchical and where the acquisition of a higher language is usually accompanied by a strong disregard for the other language and an increasingly limited literacy in it. A parallel development. We've seen elite literati like Vaginalisha and Vartendu Harris Chandra who were intensely interested in oral popular genres, particularly songs. And yet from the early 20th century onwards, these genres have been seen as part of folk literature, romanticized as anonymous, rural, traditional, a temporal, and thus non-modern. This has contributed to a separation between literature, proper, and folk literature, and the marginalization of oral poets and performance, like Llampramata Avatariada o Virahia, and of non-standard varieties of Hindi and Urdu. A marginalization that translates as complete absence from textbooks and literary histories. It just stops being there. Yet not all changes in the colonial period led towards the hegemony of print and written literature over oral practices or the dominance of colonial English. After all, expanding the treasure trove of modern literature in one's language was one of the cornerstones of nationalism, so two more elements need to be considered. First, regarding the equation between oral and written, poetry meetings, Urdu moshairas, but also Hindicavisa Melon, which became public affairs in this period. In fact, the prime cultural events at nationalist meetings and later in cross-state diplomacy ensured the continuing currency of orally transmitted poetry. The Urdu moshaira and Ghazal in particular entered a symbiotic relationship with print culture across scripts, so I think there were among the first genres that were published easily in Devanagri and in Roman letters, but also then with radio, with cinema, and more recently digital technology. Try typing moshaira in YouTube and see the whole channels that are dedicated to them in the subcontinent and among the South Asian diaspora. Finally, a new aspect of print culture under colonialism was the dramatic broadening of literary horizons through translation. Readers and authors in the early modern period were aware of the literary world, the wider world for sure, but their literary world was shaped by the reach of their languages. Your world extended as far as the languages you had access to did, so whether Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, or Hindi. By contrast, for curious intellectuals like the Urdu poet translator and critic Miraji, translation through English became a way of continuously expanding his literary world. English here acted as a conduit, not for a colonial provincial mentality, but for a new cosmopolitanism that in fact undermined England's supposed centrality. So see here how Miraji translational activity entailed looking both east and west, and not inhabiting a peripheral position vis-à-vis Europe or Britain, even if the 12 volumes of translations by Powys Mathers, East and Love was his primary source. How do multilingual literary practices rend reality square with ideologies of language, nationalism, and of global English? Well, I think we've already found some answers. Everywhere in the subcontinent, new ideas about languages belonging to a specific community is rather than a shared system of communication. New ideas about multilingualism as layers of language with the mother tongue somehow at the core, and the others are a common top. Vineers was a word that we use today. And new ideas about the need for a single language for the sake of national unity and the proper functioning of the state all have played havoc with multilingual practices and histories, and continue to do so. So quite suddenly Persian and Urdu became foreign languages, the carriers of a non-Indian Abhartir culture. In most of South Asia, post-colonial nation states and policymakers have perceived multilingualism as a problem, not as a resource, and multilingual education, the so-called three-language formula, as a burden for the child. It seemed to be one for Bhanupratab, as we saw. Moreover, ideologies of language and community and of language nationalism themselves clash with the equally widespread idea of English as the language of opportunity, now more accessible through the mushrooming everywhere of private schools and coaching institutes that yet still tantalisingly difficult to master. And while, as I said, in the colonial period, the introduction of English education coincided with a strong nationalist investment in the creation of modern literatures in Indian languages, which resulted in bilingual intellectuals who read also in English and wrote in Hindi or Bengali and so on, in more recent years, the ever-growing emphasis on English in education, this global English, you learn English and you reach the world, is accompanied by a perception of one's own language as a handicap. People talk of their own language as a handicap that needs to be overcome. In such a context, it takes a real shift in vision to imagine a less agonistic multilingualism, and it takes strong counterforces to lead one to discover, rediscover, and cultivate literary interests in those languages. As many in fact of English educated students from India or from South Asia who rediscover Hindi, Bengali, or the literature here at SOAS will tell you. But luckily those forces exist, do exist. Yet it's interesting that whatever they hew, modern language ideologies tend to pit languages against each other and believe in a kind of language Darwinism. Instead, the multilingual poet and intellectual Arvin Krishnamarhotra suggests alternative metaphors, languages as sources of light, attended by eclipses and penumbral zones, languages as lightning conductors, earthing each other's electric storms, languages as geological faults, sending mild tremors through each other, languages as conjugate mirrors. Even today, multilingualism does not have to be so agonistic, so hierarchical, particularly when aesthetic experience and expression are involved. Two more points. This is one of my favorite examples. The leading Urdu literary critic, Shamsuraman Faruki, and the late leading scholar of early Hindi, Dr Kishori Lal, both lived in Allahabad but never met once. There was never a common platform, a space, an opportunity for them to meet. As in Rashi Rohadgi's recent study of the Multilingual Literary Culture of Mauritius, the evidence suggests that institutional meeting places of voluntary associations that cut across language boundaries, the Citi Academy, the Jan Vadile Kaksang and so on, are essential. Otherwise social hierarchies earlier and now circles of taste and literary habitus, key communities of writers largely divided on the basis of language. So unlike Banu Prathap's overlapping circles of literary acquaintances then, multilingualism seems to have become more a case of knowing the names of writers in other languages or just of readerly contact through translations rather than direct contact between writers, apart from fleeting occasions such as literary festivals. So the Jaipur Literary Festival, though largely in English, consistently gets Basha writers, as writers not in English are called, to come and speak and has panels with writers from different Indian languages. The language Darwinism that I mentioned earlier also means that it is hostile statements that make the news reinforcing mutual wariness, like the spat in the 1990s between critic Meenakshi Mukherjee and writer Vikram Chandra on Indian writing in English and the question of authenticity or the more recent controversy of a bestselling English writer Chetan Bhagat who said that those who read Hindi novels are not cool. And that got a blog by a Hindi writer protesting and there was a controversy. So within this context, any occasion like the Samanbae Literary Festival in fact where writers, readers and orators from different languages including English can meet and interact in an atmosphere of mutual respect and curiosity is really important and those who create such occasions are to be congratulated. It is the lack of curiosity and self-doubt that still stings in Salman Rushdie's famous pronouncement. And here I think is an example of the production of ignorance if ever there was one. Now, my final point. A small question. How does literary multi-legalism work in practice? Do writers and readers cultivate the various languages and language literary tastes separately or do they mix them? Now to go back once more to Bhanu Pratap he sang and recited devotional poetry with his satsang circle and the Persian text with other mentors and friends. Although he translated across poetic idioms Persian into Brachbasha he did not mix them. And I think by and large in the early modern period that's what happens that people cultivate you have to learn poetics, you learn meter and you cultivate those literary poetic tastes separately. If you mix it's at the level of register you don't mix meters for example. Or you say like this poet he's really grounded in Hindi poetry he's learned meter, prosody and the many forms of Hindi poetry he has strolled through Persian poetry. So clearly knows it less well. In the 20th century with literary communities aligned more on the basis of language we see an interesting tension emerge between implicit expectations that readers are monolingual and attempts to include a variety of registers and poetic forms. So we have this interesting paradox that the same readers who relish Urdu Ghazals or folk song in Hindi films are expected not to understand them as written literature. Whereas commercial publishers in the 19th century simply transliterated between Urdu and Hindi they didn't change anything from the early 20th century we have actual word substitution on the basis that Hindi readers will not understand Urdu words. So when you come across writers like Ubra who references the range of poetic tastes Urdu, Bratwasha, Urdu, so on that Hindi readers had access and responded to or Reino who incorporates many popular songs and perform a genre in his novel it's then that we become aware how much narrower the range of poetic tastes come in most Hindi literary texts. For writers who continue to be sensitive multilinguals for whom to echo Arvin Krishnamer-Hotra languages are lightning conductors earthing each other's electric storms how does their multilingualism find expression? For many poets even if they write only in one language the strategy has been to become translators using translation like miragi to connect and to connect to idioms and repertoires far flung in time and space and make them part of themselves. About the Bombay bilingual Marathi English poet Arun Kolatkar Mehrotra writes Occasionally Kolatkar translated his Marathi poems into English but mostly he kept them the two separate sometimes he wondered what the connection between them was or if there was any connection at all but Kolatkar created two very different bodies of work of equal distinction and importance in two languages the achievement I think Mehrotra continues has few parallels in world literature what has a parallel at least in India is that he drew in his work from a multiplicity of literary traditions he drew on Marathi of course and Sanskrit which he knew he drew on the English and American traditions especially black American music and speech in a European tradition he drew on a few others beside as he said in an interview once talking about poets anything might swim into their can and I think in this poet seem to be more catholic and more acknowledging of their catholicity than fiction writers for some reason my conclusions a multilingual approach to literature is not so much about knowing many languages but developing a particular vision in the position of text and traditions in the wider multilingual world and exploring how literary multilingualism works rather than having some fixed idea or model of it it means looking for tensions between statements and practices for silences and exclusions and for discontinuities not expecting everything to fit if it doesn't fit it shouldn't fit Madam, is ke kya prasange gta he? What is the relevance of this? A scholar student in Delhi asked me last year when I spoke about this work and I've been trying to answer him ever since so well, for one thing this shows that the path to be more layered, connected and interesting than the flat clash of civilisations that we are presented with in India today taking multilingualism seriously and through its traces following how it changed and along with changes in society and culture is a starting point to question ideas about language what the archives do or do not keep receive narratives of literary history and so on having a longer view also helps us question not the power dynamics which literature is necessarily part of but the relentlessly agonistic views that govern both nationalist narratives as well as recent models of world literature modern institutions see multilingualism as a problem as if monolingualism were the norm and put forward and pitch language against language from very different premises the same is true of many postcolonial and world literature approaches exposing the dominance of English or French becomes wittingly or unwittingly a way of ignoring the literary worlds beyond them the discourse of English as the global language and the language of world literature seems to suggest that everyone reading or writing in other languages may as well stop but multilingualism, the coexistence of multiple aesthetic codes and repertoires refuses to go away in India Urdu is a good example even it's almost disappearance from formal education recently we have seen a real return of the repressed whether it's the impressive website rehtha.org the festival Jasne rehtha or the resurgence of Dastan storytelling and of course the ever-present Mushayras rehtha.org gives Urdu poems in Urdu, Hindi and Roman scripts with explanations, tutorials, historical background and much more poetry recitals and Dastan performances require no script to savour the taste of the language the popularity shows that a society used to accessing several aesthetics is reluctant to give them up and have only one finally, how does one become multilingual and this is for light comic relief when I was doing my PhD in Montague Street leaving Montague Street though unfortunately I started much later than Bhanupratab I wish I had started memorising my couplets at three and a half for me too becoming multilingual has been a continuing probably a lifelong process and a very happy one shared with different informal groups of people and I'd like to thank all of them here including Alok who I don't know if he's here but he's the one with the glasses as part of the Urdu club these groups only partly overlapped and they're all outside institutional frameworks interestingly for each of us I think becoming multilingual acquiring a multilingual approach has fostered an attitude towards literature and the world that is one of discovery, not of mastery we bring this attitude to the project that we have just started which will compare the modern multilingual literary cultures of North India, the Horn of Africa and the Maghreb and I hope many of you will want to be part of it thank you Francesca's work has been of such an important level and so important to so many of us for so long it's also one of the few talks in your life that you give it so as where you get to wear a rather silly costume perhaps one very much designed for men and it's my years of experience with graduation I know about you have to wear the button for wearing these robes it's also rather nice that you give a talk and you don't get any questions so I can hardly begin to sum up this project which is so amazing but I think when you heard Francesca talk there you got some idea of why Francesca has become a professor so as not only of course her own multilingualism which is so important but this blend she really brings to her work of very lightly mixing all these topics from the personal, from the account of one person from a real close-up on somebody's life and their knowledge of language to these huge questions taking us almost spinning out from here across these points asking important questions where are language boundaries and where are they communications I think we do tend to think of communications so much more than boundaries there this attention she paved to texts but also to speech is important differentiating literature from spoken language but different genres within that literature I think really came out to me so clearly today in her speech but I know it's 7.30 so I can't even begin to repeat with any form of elegance what Francesca has said so I will take this literally I'm not quite sure what I vote for but I know I am here to give thanks and thanks to Francesca I think thanks to Francesca from all of us here tonight really the fact people have come here tonight to hear her speak and so I can do it on behalf of the many but it's not just us who are here in the audience tonight who would want to thank Francesca so I'm going to speak on behalf of all sorts of people who haven't appointed me Francesca from the point of view of Hindi I mean Francesca's really kept Hindi not just alive at Sehwath but kept Sehwath at the world centre for Hindi and also not just that but linking Hindi to other disciplines in Sehwath not just keeping it as something tucked away in a corner but bringing it out with complet with many other disciplines here at Sehwath I also want to thank Francesca as a colleague from the wider body of us at Sehwath not just the department but all of us at Sehwath as a colleague when no one will do it Francesca will do it I mean you know as we say in Indian English she has rendered Yeoman service to us all in the department and to me particularly I mean my life at Sehwath would have been not just unbearable but impossible frankly if Francesca hadn't been there always such a support to us in all ways Francesca and I no longer have the lurking around bus stops at midnight and hanging around dubious areas of Indian cities together nowadays we tend to see each other more to talk about teaching assessments peer observation of teaching research plans and we've even been at each other's heads of department I was never quite sure which one of us was the head but we've also had many other times together across this we've seen many significant birthdays perhaps too many with zeros on the end some more recent than others for which some of us have not yet been invited to a party we've seen at least one wedding but really for Francesca we want to say just thank you for being Francesca I think that's really been it for all of us so now just before I invite us all to a reception afterwards there's one little joke Francesca and I've had for many years between us in the manner of a Hindi film perhaps in a Hindi film there's often a good sister and a bad sister and sometimes usually they're played by the same actress well Francesca and I don't really look alike but but I thought if I were black tonight I'd be casting my role quite clearly and I was glad to see Francesca in white perhaps it's also covered by these robes these differences can be removed and just to say once again to Francesca congratulations a much-deserved perhaps overdue professorship and we look forward to hearing the big talk at the end of the project next thank you Francesca